KP Direction Blog

Server uptime guarantees

2008-06-18T10:10:00.004-06:00

As mentioned in our previous blog posting, we are moving our datacenter to the US; this means we now have space on a server in the US and a server in London, ensuring that our clients in both countries get the fastest possible response for their websites.

Our server uptimes are still exemplary, as we show on our Server Status page (http://www.kpdirection.com/serverstatus.php). We're proud of this, and our monitoring is done in real-time by a third party company to prove that we're not just making the figures up.

As you can see from the uptime graph, both servers are showing an uptime more than 99.99% for 2008. And, of course, we *don't* guarantee this! Why? Because we live in the real world. Our aim is to make sure that your websites and email are available as much as possible, but for us to guarantee this would involve paying for insurance against downtime. This cost would have to be passed onto our clients - who would therefore end up paying more for the same level of service, and subsidizing a guarantee that is virtually worthless because of the myriad of aspects that can stop a particular user accessing a website.

So, what if you need a guarantee? Call us to discuss a dedicated server for your company.

How much will hosting cost? Less than you expect for business class hosting, but we charge more than companies like GoDaddy and Hostgator, and we don't offer unlimited bandwidth and diskspace. This is because we are a business that wants to understand your business and offer you the services you need. We deliberately don't overload our servers with as many websites as we can fit on them, and we keep our customer base down to a manageable level; we know all our clients by name, and they know they can ring us at any time day or night and we'll sort their web hosting problems for them. We run our business for businesses!

Swift - Maintenance Completed

2008-06-11T08:20:00.002-06:00

Maintenance and upgrades on Swift are now complete.

The next planned change is this weekend, 14/15 June, when we'll be moving to a new datacentre in the US. This is a slightly more involved change, but we'll try to ensure that downtime is kept to a minimum.

Server Upgrades

2008-06-05T13:13:00.004-06:00

Just a quick note to say that our servers will be upgraded on Tuesday 10th June 2008 (for Swift) and Wednesday 11th June 2008 (for Mentor). This is the first scheduled outage for both servers since we started offering web hosting to our clients, and our published statistics (http://www.kpdirection.com/serverstatus.php) - monitored by a third party company - show how reliable our business-class hosting is.

This upgrade is for a major version change of PHP, seeing us remove PHP4 from the servers and upgrade to the latest PHP5 version. We will also roll out other minor version upgrades of various system and service packages at the same time as this maintenance for PHP. Finally the server will be rebooted towards the end of the maintenance window to boot to a new kernel version and run any required disk check (FSCK).

All upgrades will commence at 10PM UK Time (3pm MT). We anticipate completing the maintenance prior to 7AM (UK Time) (Midnight MT) the following morning.

During the maintenance window the control panel will be unavailable, all other services remaining online and functional including your websites and email services. Towards the end of the maintenance window there will be approx 2 minutes of downtime as we reboot the server.

Do you test?

2008-04-24T09:29:00.004-06:00

In our opinion, website development isn't quite a professional industry. There are pockets of professionalism, but certainly on the Small/Medium Business side there is certainly a high proportion of 'Nephews' (as in, "My Nephew does computers at school, so he's doing our website for us"... really? Well, that's the sort of client KP Direction would rather not have anyway!).

One of the aspects where an amateurish approach really shows through is in dynamic websites created with PHP - specifically, the Testing area. A web development company we know of recently told us that they'd almost finished a large scale website for a major client, and were now ready to test it - how could they show their client that they had a formal testing process in place? We fell off our chairs. What they were asking is, "How can we pretend to our client that we do something that we don't really do".

Testing a dynamic website properly is the same as any major software engineering project - and as such, it starts at the start of the project. You can test your PHP class definitions as they are written, which reduces the time required at the end of the project - at which point, testing should not pop up any major surprises. Testing properly is a career in itself, similar to Designer or Programmer.

At a simplistic level there are two ways to test a site; White Box and Black Box.

White Box testing means that a test designer (who should *not* be the programmer at this stage) is able to see the specification for the internal class definitions used in the program. He then designs a series of tests which test every possible combination of input - valid and not - to see if the program handles them correctly, returning valid results or user friendly error messages as appropriate. Remember to test *every* input field (e.g, name, address1, zip code) for No input, short input (1 character), long input (More characters than are allowed), extended character input (e.g Quotes, backslashes), invalid input (deliberately put an incorrect value in to see if the system handles the error correctly). All tests should include database accesses.

Black Box testing comes after White Box. This time a second tester does not have access to the specifications of the system. Their approach is to use the system normally and abnormally - they should use it as normal users, and document their results, but they should also try to break the system - by unscrupulous means as well as valid ones - such as xss attacks etc.

After Black Box and White Box testing, you then move to Beta test - invite certain people to just 'use' the system. If you've created and proved valid test plans already, they shouldn't be able to break it. You can do that before, during, or *instead of* (yes, I've had clients do that!) User Acceptance testing - let the client play with the system and see if it does exactly what they asked for. It's not unknown for a system to get to this stage, then the client sees what you've built, and admits that they really wanted something else...

The deliverable to the client is sight of the test plans at each stage, which shows that you're taking testing seriously. To give an idea of size, a test plan I did for a contact form (OK, a reasonable complex one which wrote the information to a database, sent emails etc) was 281 separate test cases.

As you can see, then, testing is an intrinsic aspect of web development. Odd things can still happen, and requirements can change - you can never allow for absolutely all combinations of strange user inputs - but a good testing plan shows that you care about your product.

As you may have guessed, we care. If you care as well, let us know, and lets discuss your next web site development. And if you're a developer who needs to show a client that you have a formal testing procedure in place - call us on (801) 928 6953. We can work with you to develop procedures, or you can outsource your module or system testing to us.

AVG 8 and NetNanny

2008-04-22T13:02:00.007-06:00

We're always looking for the best ways to keep our computers and children secure and safe, so this morning I decided to upgrade our antivirus software. Bad move, as you will find out...

Obviously we don't want to go into too many details about our network security, but at a high level, we run the following software;

MailFoundry - runs on our mail servers to reduce the amount of spam we get - we see about two or three a day now (we supply access to this free to all our hosting clients as well)
cloudmark desktop - puts the final clean and polish on spam - with this in place, we reduce spam to essentially zero, and more importantly, we don't see any false positives (valid emails marked as spam)
AVG Security Suite - Provides anti virus, firewall, antispyware, anti-rootkit... all you need to surf without fear
NetNanny - Stops access to inappropriate content and websites - of which there are more and more these days. We *know* that we and our children can surf without fear of accidentally accessing adult websites - can you say the same?

Anyway, back to the story. I upgraded to AVG Internet Security version 8; everything seemed to go OK, until I tried to access the internet. No go. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Both Mozilla and Internet Explorer just sat there waiting, and wouldn't show me any web content. Usually when this happens, NetNanny is sitting underneath another window, waiting for my input. But not in this case - it simply wasn't listening.

A deinstall of AVG 8 followed, quickly followed by another deinstall (the first one was completely ignored by AVG, and it restarted when I rebooted the machine). Once I had it deinstalled, I searched the internet for help, but found little help except a few posts claiming the same problem, and more than one response from AVG technical saying that AVG 8 will not work with NetNanny. Fortunately, this is incorrect!

The problem, I found, was that AVG 8 has a module called 'Web Shield', which works in a very similar way to NetNanny - and the two were conflicting. Turning off webshield in AVG didn't solve the problem, but deinstalling AVG8, reinstalling it using the Custom Install option and deselecting Web Shield did the trick. OK, I may have lost a little (minor!) level of functionality, but I think we're more than covered in that aspect.

A happy ending, and now I can continue with my day - 4 hours behind!

Tabitha - the not-so-feral cat

2008-04-16T12:32:00.004-06:00

Wow! What a trip this has been with Tabitha - our feral cat that we got over Christmas in 2007.

She has had horrible spells of colitis which means that whenever and wherever, she would leave unsavory deposits all over the house. Especially the chairs in our office and the kitchen. The feeling would scare her and she would race all over until she would lose control.

We took her to the vet and got her on a high-fiber diet (high-fibre for you UK fans) and some medicine to relax her intestines. It did the trick for awhile. But being around people would stress her out so much that it would keep coming back. That's why we put her in the small bathroom.

She stayed there for about two months with small forays out into the rest of her world. While in the bathroom, she would hide in her drawer (her safe place) and we would have to coax her out with food or soft talk. Then she would come up to us and purr like crazy as we pet her. Sometimes we were able to hold her on our lap and pet her. At first, she was so unused to purring and being touched that she would gag on her saliva. The gagging reflex went away after a couple of weeks and normal eating habits were established.

As time went on and she became familiar with the whole family petting her, we would let her out into a small area - like the hallway in front of the bathroom with all the doors to the rooms closed. There she would play with us (from a distance) and play with the other two cats. As time went on, we let her have more and more room. Now she roams the house freely.

If we have company, we put her back into the bathroom as she feels secure there. Or if she gets another bout of colitis and we can see that she is stressed. By keeping her there for a couple of days, she feels safe again and she calms down and is back to normal.

There are times she gets little frisky spells and she hides on the third stair down while I crouch down and move my hand back and forth at the edge of the second stair. Her eyes get that big, cross-eyed, huge-pupiled look and I know she wants to play. She'll try to bat at my hand, run down a step, twist around and come back for more. At first, when she would touch my hand, she would kind of freak out and quit. Now she'll bat it just fine.

She likes to sleep on a towel next to Pete while he is working on the computer. He'll pet her and then she'll groom his hand. She'll lick his fingers and bite at the tips and his nails. I claim it's his English flesh! Even the mosquitoes in Utah can't stay away from him! He is our new insect repellant - we just hang out with him on our walks and he attracts them all. I know, I know - I've deviated. Back to the story of Tabitha...

She has her safe places where we can pet her. It usually has to be on a blanket or a towel. If she knows that we want to touch her, she'll run to it, crouch down and wait to be stroked. She'll then purr. The amount of safe places increases with time.

One morning I woke up rather early, came out of the bathroom and all three cats were there with their eyes half-shut. You could just see they were thinking it was rather early to be up and about but what the heck - nice way to start the day early. I grabbed Gabriel (the perfect cat) and stroked him. I then picked up Tommy Thompson (the stinky one - that cat just does not know how to keep it clean!) and stroked him. Tabitha then allowed me to stroke her. She is very smart; she'll observe me stroking Gabriel and holding him and cooing at him and then she'll imitate his behavior. She'll actually come up to me for some petting!

This morning was a huge breakthrough. I got up early again - all the other cats were sleeping with kids so she had been alone that night. She came right up and meowed (in Tabby-Lab language that means - hey! You can touch me right now), so I stroked her. I sat down with my coffee and started to study the Bible. She hopped onto the couch and sat right next to me so I could pet her. Huge strides!

We have great hopes for this one. I believe within a year, she will be a lap cat and quite normal.

A New Site that hasn't gone to the dogs...

2008-04-06T19:07:00.005-06:00

After a long development (starting in September 2007), KP Direction launched a redesign of the Greyhound Gang website in February.

The challenge was to redesign a successful website whilst keeping (and hopefully increasing) the sites existing visitor numbers and Google Page Rank. A further challenge was taking another companies page designs and turning them into a website with a consistent look and feel.

The site was initially all in HTML apart from Auction software; the new site is designed entirely in PHP, using MySQL as the database.

Challenges include the bimonthly updates of auctions, contests, special offers and ad-hoc updates of news items. Many of these were done on the old site manually, which was extremely labour intensive on the Monday-evening turnarounds. The new site has a time-sensitive staging area so that these changes can be constructed days, weeks or even months in advance, and the system will automatically switch them over at the designated time.

The site has been live since the middle of February, and the visitor numbers are staying stable, with the site now back up to it's previous Page Rank level. The sites owners have a website maintenance contract with KP Direction, and we look forward to the imminent redevelopment project to integrate auction software into the look and feel of the site.

The Worst Bank in the World

2008-03-22T14:33:00.002-06:00

Today's award for the Worst Bank In The World goes to Abbey Business, in the UK.

I phoned them on Thursday...

Me: I'm in the US, and I'm going to be using my bank card over the next few days to withdraw large amounts of money. Is that OK?
Abbey: Yes, that's fine - there was already a note on your account saying that you are in the US.

So, Thursday evening I went and withdrew some money from the cashpoint. Lovely...

Saturday, I go to withdraw some more money, and the card doesn't work. After a few minutes ranting about absolute idiots in the UK Banking business, I paid for an international telephone call to the number on the card, only to find out that they all go home at 1pm on a Saturday.

I go home, and use the internet to check my balance; sufficient money there, but they've cancelled all cards on the account. More ranting and raving.

I ring the lost/stolen cards line to tell them that my cards were NOT lost or stolen - but they can't do anything for me. They can lock cards from future use, but can't unlock them.

So now I'm left without access to that account until Tuesday, when I can get on the phone and call them various names. I can accept them blocking my cards if I *DIDN'T* tell them where I was, but that's exactly *WHY* I rang them. Which specific part of the phrase "I'm in the US" didn't they quite understand?

My second call on Tuesday will be to an alternative bank. Grrrrr.

Accessibility

2008-03-13T11:53:00.004-06:00

A question for all business owners out there... how much thought do you give to users with accessibility issues?

If you have physical premises, then the answer is quite a bit; you're required by law to provide certain facilities, such as ramps where stairs are, elevator access to multiple floors, special bathroom facilities etc; all of which can cost considerable amounts of money.

So, how many of your customers could potentially have a disability of some sort. 1%? No. 2%? No. Try 20% - according to this report, almost 1 in 5 people in the US have some sort of disability. This is exactly why there are laws requiring business owners to give thought to accessibility issues.

On the web, then, how many of your site visitors have disabilities? Very few, I think you'd guess; one of our clients several years ago asked us why we gave attention to accessibility issues; "How many blind people buy cars?" He was surprised when I told him what we're about to tell you.

Around 30% of all traffic to KP Direction is from blind users.

Sounds a lot - but most of that traffic is from search engines. Google is the largest blind web user in the world.

What does that mean for you? Simple; if your website looks good for blind users, it will look good to Google.

Easier said than done, but KP Direction can help you by developing a new website which works well for blind users, or we can provide consultancy helping you convert an existing website to present your information better to Google.

On our side, we have a few tools we use daily in web development;

Mozilla
Internet Explorer is broken - Standards are taken as just guidelines, so a site developed in IE might not display correctly in Mozilla. We develop for Mozilla, then make any necessary adjustments for IE.

Lynx
Lynx is an assistive technology browser. We use the Yellowpipe Lynx Viewer tool to show us exactly how a web page is displayed to a blind user.

Turn images off
Not actually an accessibility issue, but we feel that any good webpage should work just as well with images switched off as on. With so many inappropriate and un-christian images being displayed on even innocuous web pages these days, it's just the safe, easy way out. We have images turned on only for web pages we are actually working on. This helps us also to focus on the content of the page rather than the tinsel around the edges.

So, giving a bit more thought to web based disability accessibility issues now? Then contact us, and lets discuss how KP Direction can help you and your website.

Stopping Spam

2008-02-26T16:27:00.003-07:00

Unfortunately for those of us who live their lives on the net, Spam is a fact of life. Most users have two choices - spend lots of time dealing with it, or ignore it and hope it goes away.

KPDirection clients have another choice; let us handle it using our MailFoundry system.

Traditional spam filtering provided by other hosts (such as Spamassassin) uses keyword scoring to 'guess' which emails look like spam, this results in poor performance and often genuine email being trashed as spam - which none of us wants. MailFoundry uses human created definitions, rather than guess work, to identify known spam email messages and remove them fast and accurately.

Here are some numbers;

Every five minutes the anti-spam defintions are updated by a real live human being. That's 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (we're sure it's not just ONE human being doing this...!)

Less than one in every million emails will be a false-positive (i.e, a valid email for you that is marked and deleted as spam). 100% of all known viruses and 99% of all known spam is deleted at the server without you having to do anything at all.

And what do you have to do? Nothing. Just host your website with KPDirection, and it will all happen automatically. MailFoundry is a free addition to our hosting services, and it saves our time (and your money) by completely off-loading the spam issue to someone else. So we're happy to pass that benefit and saving on to you.

But I don't host with KPDirection!

Not a problem. We seriously recommend the Cloudmark Desktop Antispam solution; again, users don't need to do anything, just watch all that spam simply disappear, never to be seen again.

If you'd like to talk more to us about hosting at KP Direction, Web Site Design, or IT Management solutions in the Syracuse and Salt Lake / Wasatch Front areas, just drop us a line. Our policy is Best Advice - if we can't help you, we'll help you find someone who can.

Feral Cat Update

2008-01-13T21:07:00.000-07:00

So, how goes our feral taming experience? Patience - we have to remember patience.

We never realized what we were getting into when we got this 6 month old cat. Tabitha is an absolutely gorgeous seal point ragdoll siamese cat. But she is terrified of humans.

When I first got her on Christmas day, she smelled so much of urine and her beautiful coat was so dirty and ragged, that I had to give her a bath. She trembled in my arms afterwards for about an hour until she was dry. I had no idea that she did not like to be touched.

We got her home and kept her in a large cage for a few days in an area where she could watch our interaction with the other kittens. Once in awhile, I'd open the door and stroke her. Sometimes, we'd pull her out and hold her. We realized later that this was not the way to train her.

After a few more days, we let her roam the house. She would always find a place to hide and not come out to eat or drink. I would put moist cat food on my fingers and reach under the bed so she could eat out of my hand.

This worried us, especially when she started not using the litter box again, even when it was right next to her. I checked out the Alley Cat Allies site and did some research. I also called Michelle at New Beginnings because we were at our wits end with this situation. It seemed to be getting worse instead of better.

Following advice, and newly armed with knowledge, we put Tabitha in a little bathroom downstairs; we removed everything and left a food dish, a water bowl, and the litter box. A radio was tuned to a talk show channel and kept low. The cupboard doors under the sink were left open which left open access to the drawers on the sides. In the largest one, I place a little rug so she had a private place of her own.

Several times a day, someone from our family would go in and talk to her, reach a hand in to try and pet her, coax her into coming out. She was not coming out, she was not eating again, and not drinking any fluids.

Day two of bathroom confinement was pretty much the same as day one except that she would purr when I pet her. The concern over lack of food and water increased. I again offered moist food by hand. She would eat a bit and then turn her head.

Day three - when I fed her in her drawer, I slowly pulled my hand away so she had to stretch her neck to eat. Then she had to step out of the drawer. The last thing she did was sit *in* the cupboard, but her dainty little feet were not going to touch that floor! She also let me pet her quite a bit. She would not stop purring. I got her to play a little with a feather toy. When she had enough, Tabitha went back into the drawer. I had been dismissed! :)

Day four was a huge improvement. She came out onto the floor to be pet. She went to the bowl and ate food. I noticed that it seemed like her gums were sore, which explained why she probably would not eat the dry food. So, the food is now moistened with water which adds the benefit of fluids going down her throat. The litter box was showing signs of enough food and fluids now.

We tried to let her out for awhile, but she got that hunted (and haunted) look again, so we immediately put her back into solitary confinement.

Today is day five. Yesterday, I tried putting her on my lap to pet her. She seemed a little tense, but still purred. I made sure that I put her down and not let her decide when to get down. Today, she put her paws on my knees and settled into my lap when I put her on. She will walk by us now without looking scared. We opened the door again today and let her come out just into the hallway. She played with the other kittens a bit, played with the feather we dangled in front of her, but was still a bit spooked. After five minutes, I knew that it was time to put her away.

When I put her in, she went straight to the drawer and wouldn't come out for awhile. I stayed with her until I could coax her out. We parted on good terms.

All this extra work for a cat has brought on some side effects - we've all fallen hopelessly in love with Miss Princess Tabitha.

Concerns to bring up to the vet tomorrow - when she purrs, she does an awful lot of swallowing, almost gaggy. She did the same after eating. I know her gums are sore, but the gagging? We'll have to get her in for a good checkup.

More to come, I'm sure!

Our new Cats

2008-01-11T20:35:00.001-07:00

As a response to a flood of requests from readers (thanks, Mom!), here are some pictures of two of our Siamese cats; Gabrielle and Tom.

To the left is Gabrielle (previously Gabriel, until we looked more closely...). For some reason, she was called 'Fuzzy' by the adoption agency (and the kids) when we first got her on Christmas Day. She's not really fuzzy, she just has lots of bad hair days!

The second photo shows Tom (on the left) and Gabrielle (to the right), having a full and frank discussion about which of them would sit on Pete's laptop keyboard whilst he wasn't looking. Pete claims that the cats have actually *improved* his coding in PHP...

The Mysterious World of Feral Cats

2008-01-08T21:01:00.000-07:00

I've never heard the phrase before and knew nothing about it although I've been a cat lover all of my life. Mom trained us well when she welcomed a plethora of stray cats into our home during my lifetime with her. I was hooked.

I married a proper, staid, self-controlled, quiet Englishman who had no wife, no children, no plants, and NO pets. So I, out of the great kindness and generosity of my heart, gave him a wife, five kids, a grandchild on the way, four plants, and three cats. He has shown no regrets so far! (Phew)

Pete and I got this brilliant idea to give kittens to our kids for Christmas. Since we have three children in the home, we decided on three kittens! We talked to an animal adoption agency here in Utah called New Beginnings. We were told about a lady who was not able to have children - she had cats instead. She had so many cats that she and her husband did not have the time to socialize with these cats. The last time the owner counted, there were 35 cats and still mating. The cats are all different types of Siamese - chocolate point, ragdoll, seal point, lynx (or tabby) point, blue point - to name a few. I had no idea there were so many Siamese types around.

New Beginnings is working with the owners to get them spayed, neutered and adopted out. That's how it all began. Michelle at New Beginnings, was able to tame a couple of kittens which is where we got our two lynx points - they are siblings and are three months old. They've been unanimously voted as the best cats you could own!

However, we couldn't decide on the third one since there weren't any more adoptable, younger kittens. Our idea was to go to the cat owner's house and choose one. This would possibly save a cat's life.

They were all there, I think - we just couldn't see any of them. Only a couple cats stayed around to visit with us. The owners brought out canned food for the cats and then they all came out. That's when the conversation started about "feral." I had no idea what it meant nor why a cat would behave that way.

Oxford Dictionary defines feral as "untamed, in a wild state after escape from captivity or domestication." We could not get close to any of them. I was able to get a few to play with my necklace but I couldn't touch them at all.

We decided on Tabitha, a gorgeous six month old seal point ragdoll. Christmas morning was delivery day. Tabitha would not let us touch her. She would sit under my son's bed (unfortunately, it's a queen size so it's quite a reach to grab her) and not eat for days. She would hiss, bite and scratch if we tried to hold her. We had no idea what to do! We tried coaxing her out with toys, canned food, treats, etc. Nothing.

After a few days, I was able to get her to eat a little canned food from my hand. I was also able to hold her a bit, but she trembled like crazy and would be curled up in a fetal ball the whole time. You could almost mold her like playdough!

A week later, she would purr when I scratched under her neck, but only when she was in her "safe" place - a little cat house/scratching post combo. If I pulled her out, she would growl. She did come out to play when we brought her into the fun with the other kittens. But she would play from her position of sitting down royally, with her long, fluffy tail draped daintily around her feet. She wouldn't budge but her front paw once in a while. She is nicknamed Princess Tabitha now.

This is the end of the second week now. We despair sometimes and want to give up. I'll call New Beginnings and, and due to their excellent advice, we end trying some more. Today we hit the website that they recommended: Alley Cat Allies. A lot of information and directions for taming a feral kitten in addition to information about how they are working to help the feral cat population. There is hope again. The alternative could be putting her down if we send her back. We don't think we could handle that one.

One thing the site said was that feral cats usually need to be tamed while quite young. This one is already past the five month mark; that part was a little disheartening. But since she has shown signs of liking to eat from our hands, purring when touched and playing with the other kids, err... kittens - who knows?

We'll keep you posted...

In the meantime, here is some great information about Feral Cats from Alley Cat Allies. You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to view this file. You can download a free version from the Adobe website.

All About Feral Cats (View or download PDF)

Cheers! (as my hubby is fond of saying)

Domain Renewal Scams

2008-01-08T09:30:00.000-07:00

Firstly, what is a Scam? Merriam-Webster (Scams) has it as 'a fraudulent or deceptive act or operation', and the Domain Registry of America is certainly being deceptive with its marketing activities. Domain Slamming is another term used for these marketing practices.

As a service to our clients, KP Direction (and our technology partner Acute Computing) provides domain registration facilities. We know that our clients have many more important things to do than play with technical issues, so we handle as little or as much of the clients DNS and Domain information as they wish. We handle all the client invoicing in-house, so we were surprised this week when two separate clients contacted us regarding their domain renewals through the Domain Registry of America (click here to see a sample letter).

On reading this letter closely, it's actually a request for the user to switch their domain away from KP Direction and to the Domain Registry of America. The text of the letter stresses how urgent it is to do this before your domain expires ('Act today!'), so that the reader will process the 'invoice' immediately, without contacting their technical support people. The letters usually come out between three and five months before the domain renewal is due - in order to beat real renewal invoices, which are usually three months before.

How to handle these letters

Know your Domains You should always know where your domains are registered and hosted, and have access to any usernames and passwords required to make changes. At KP Direction we notify all clients of this information, and keep a secure copy of this record in-house - available on request, in case the client loses it!

Use a Purchase Ordering System If you purchase something which will result in an invoice coming your way, keep a record (Excel is fine for starters) showing the item, a unique reference, and the amount. Give the unique reference to the supplier as a 'Purchase Order Number', and if they do not specify the PO Number on the invoice they send, you can then query the invoice in-depth - if the number matches, it can be paid immediately. Companies like Domain Slammers never contact you in advance for this information, so will never have valid PO Numbers for you.

Any domain renewals will generally be handled by ourselves, and the invoice will come from KP Direction or Acute Computing, and will have a PO Number on if you supply us with it. If you see a suspicious invoice, clients are welcome to contact us for further directions - which may involve a circular filing cabinet (the bin!).

Don't Pay! Never - EVER - send any payment until you are sure it's a valid invoice. In the case of the Domain Registry of America, all fees are final. If the transfer is declined, or doesn't complete for ANY reason, you won't get a refund. Note that KP Direction has Domain Locking switched on by default for all .com and .org domains, and this is one reason why a transfer would fail.

If in any doubt, search the internet. Scams can often be identified by checking out Google and/or Snopes with the company name.

KP Direction prides itself on giving clients 'Best Advice'. If you ever need to move hosting or domain registration away from KP Direction, we will unlock the domain and provide all the help required, and standard transfers away are free. We will, however, validate that the company you are transferring to is not a domain slammer, and that you are transferring the domain in full knowledge of any technical implications that may occur (loss of email, website, etc). If in doubt, call us!

A Big Welcome

2007-12-15T10:56:00.001-07:00

We'd like to extend a warm welcome to our newest clients!

Trinity Group Resources, Inc. deals in insurance such as Final Expense, Medicare Supplement, Cancer Insurance and other services aimed primarily at the 40+ age group in several states across the US. KP Direction will be initially working with Trinity Group to redesign and restructure their website to appeal to both potential clients and prospective agents.

First Fire Protection provides sprinkler systems and maintenance services to construction companies and building contractors in Utah. KP Direction will be redesigning and updating the existing website to provide more relevant information, and developing a database driven system which will open up new business opportunities for First Fire; we're not saying any more, you'll just have to wait until it's done!

We're looking forward to building our partnerships with each company, and making them - and us - more successful in 2008!

We're growing fast, and so can you! If you want to see how KP Direction can improve your profits, contact us. We work with clients throughout the US, UK and Europe, and we'd love to hear from you.

Waffle Recipe

2007-12-09T22:17:00.001-07:00

We have a little tradition in our house - Sunday Morning Waffles (yum!)
Being from England (Pete), I prefer them with butter and salt, but the rest of the family prefer sweet things on them - Jam (jelly?), Maple Syrup, Peanut Butter... and often all at the same time!

A food crisis last week (we had forgotten to go shopping) resulted in my having to change the recipe we use for the waffles, and surprisingly enough, it worked! The change was to use 1% Milk instead of full-fat, and it gave a delicious light texture to the waffles. Note, however, that like most Waffle recipes, it isn't diet friendly..

Ingredients

2½ Cups Whole Wheat Flour, stirred and measured
¾ teaspoon Salt
4 teaspoons Baking Powder
1½ tablespoons Sugar
2 Beaten Eggs
2¼ Cups 1% (Skimmed) Milk
½ Cup Vegetable Oil

Method

Mix the Eggs, Milk and Vegetable Oil in a blender.

Combine the dry ingredients, and add to the blender just before baking.

Blend until smooth, and bake in a hot Waffle Iron

Yield

Makes 12 waffles. Which will disappear in as many minutes, if our family is anything to go by!

Pete.

Our First Blog Posting

2007-12-09T08:57:00.000-07:00

We resisted this for so long... we didn't want to do it. We didn't see the need for it, and, after all, Blogging just never would catch on.

Yes, we're luddites at heart! We don't even have a TV at home (more about that in a later post - it's a good story....). But most of all, we're not the first adopters of new techniques and/or technology.

Sounds odd for an IT company, but it's in the best interests of you - our clients. We like to wait until a technology has settled down and become part of the mainstream - and at that point we'll move in wholeheartedly.

As an example, blogging. We've waited long enough, and we're now ready to run with it. Let's see how fast we can go!